Monday, July 11, 2011

Boeing continues to make steady progress towards the 787's delivery target schedule for sometime next month or the month after. ZA102 (LN9) has already flow about 86.25 hours of the approximately 300 hours needed to to complete F&R/ETOPs testing as of July 10th. Currently the airplane is in Hawaii for tests and will be returning to Paine Field today.

ZA002 has just completed SROV testing in Japan with final testing between Tokyo and Nagoya. From all indications, the testing went very well and the production aircraft will be service ready when they start reaching customers. Here's a recap of ZA002 schedule from the past week in Japan:

When ANA starts revenue service with the 787, the destination will either be Okayama or Hiroshima from its base at Haneda International Airport in Tokyo.

Next stop for ZA002 is India where it will fly be shown to customers Air India and Jet Airways. Air India is expecting it's first 787 in December of this year while Jet Airways will receive its first airplane sometime in 2014. ZA002 will fly from Haneda in Tokyo to Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi and then on to Mumbai. From there it is not known if ZA002 will fly back to Seattle or will fly on to other destination for other visits with customer airlines.

Production continues at Everett at a rate of two 787s per month. Boeing will starting final assembly on ZA261 (LN44) for Ethiopian Airlines on July 20th but more importantly, the first 787 to be assembled in North Charleston, SC will start final assembly on August 17th. That airplane ZA286 (LN46) for United Airlines already has its wings delivered to the final assembly hall and will be waiting for the forward fuselage from Wichita as well as the center and rear section just next door to the final assembly hall. the horizontal tail plane form Grottaglie, Italy as well as the numerous other parts (tail fin from from Washington State and landing gear) are expected to be delivered soon. Boeing is expected to increase production from 2/month to 2.5/month though it is still unclear when this increase is supposed to happen. The current schedule doesn't show assembly start dates past airplane number 46 which indicates that Boeing is currently reviewing plans for future assembly start dates and thus reviewing the ramp up to the 2.5 rate.

Meanwhile Boeing has added a third 747-8I to the flight test program. The aircraft, RC003/N5020K will be used to perform high intensity radio frequency tests. It is in Southern California currently. The 747-8F F&R testing has continued but RC523 has not carried out any test flights recently. Boeing is very close to finishing off the 747-8F test program and anticipates delivering the first 747-8F to Cargolux this summer.